This Is The Goo I've Got

As I mentioned in an earlier installment, only one other boy progressed from my primary school to my secondary school at the same time as me, due to the tendency of RAF families to disappear from one year to the next. Imagine my surprise when, on the first day of my fourth year, I discovered that one of those families had come full circle and returned to the UK. After three years, I would be reunited with my old pal Martin (not to be confused with the Martin referenced in the previous year’s entry). I pretty much dropped Tam overnight, which I think he was secretly happy about because he really preferred the company of Martin (evil Martin, that is) and Vijay.

In my school, you could head into town at lunchtime if you had a signed note from your parents (sixth formers exempted, of course). Early in the year I figured that my dad’s signature was pretty simple, and forging signatures on downtown notes was a victimless crime, so I indulged with no compunction. Upon telling my dad about this, years later, he laughed and said that he would happily have signed those notes himself. I replied that I’m sure he would, but I didn’t feel the need to inconvenience him.

In my third year at secondary school, we welcomed to the class two more boys, called Martin and Vijay. They had been attending a boarding school in my home village, and had reached the age at which the school would send them back on their way.

For the first few months of the year, Tam was my new best buddy. Sometimes I’d go over to his for the night and we’d play on his Mega Drive. Sometimes he’d come over to mine and we’d play on my Amiga 500. Sometimes we’d go into the city and squeeze coins into the arcade machines. All in all, this was quite a happy time for me, as it was the first time in a while that I’d felt that I had a good friend at school.

Over the year, it gradually went from Tam and I doing things together, to Tam and Martin and Vijay and I doing things together. The same kind of stuff: sleepovers, hanging out in the city spending money and playing arcade machines, and playing Laser tag. Unfortunately, this was a time in my life when I was much more comfortable in a one-to-one situation than in a group, so I didn’t fit in as well into this new arrangement. Inevitably, in 12 months’ time it would be just Tam and Martin and Vijay doing things together.

In my second year at secondary school, changes were afoot. My best friend had moved away, and my form ((in case you are wondering what my terminology means, the term “form” denotes the 30 or so people with whom I took registration and most of my lessons. There were 4 forms in my year)) group were assigned to a new teacher who, in my opinion, looked like Paddy Ashdown. Whereas our classroom where we took registration in the first year had been up in the languages department, in the second year we inhabited a cold, crumbling portakabin in the corner of the car park, next to the kitchens. This portakabin contained one classroom, a small storeroom and a locker room, which basically constituted the nerve centre of the school’s Religious Education operation.

The space that Stephen left was filled by a new arrival, Tim. Tim’s family had moved up from London and settled down in my village. Tim played the guitar, and was full of stories of sex, drugs and rock and roll. He had a phenomenally high opinion of himself. It seems strange, therefore, that Tim and I formed a relationship, but in retrospect it all makes sense. Firstly, he hadn’t ever known Stephen, and wasn’t aware of just how bad my reputation was. And once you stripped away that exterior, I was actually quite a nice guy. Secondly, I was probably the only person in the school who didn’t find him to be an obnoxiously cocky fuckhead, for reasons unknown. Perhaps I was seduced by his guitar-playing abilities. I remember one incident vividly, where it was in the middle of a lesson and the teacher asked each of us in turn for an anecdote satisfying some particular criteria. Tim told a story that involved a hole in the classroom wall at his previous school, and was fighting back the tears as he told it because it was the funniest thing that he had ever been witness to. The rest of the classroom sat in stony silence. I, too, was the kind of person who frequently told jokes only to discover too late that they weren’t actually funny, and so as a result I felt his pain. I guess we had a lot in common.

When I was a kid, I used to fall in love with a different girl practically every week. In fact, I used to keep a frequently-updated list of all the girls at school that I fancied, ranked according to how much I fancied them at that particular moment in time.

Fortunately, such documentation was long ago lost to landfill. However, it would be a shame to forget that it had ever happened.

Preamble

In my day, at least, when schoolchildren start secondary school at 11 years of age, they become different people overnight. They move from an environment where they are surrounded by 4-11 year olds to one where they are surrounded by 11-18 year olds. I am aware that in this modern world, children are exposed to bad influences at an increasingly early age, but back then sub-11 year olds were innocent and naive, and acted like, you know, children.

While all the other children were embracing this new, mature environment, for some reason I was at the back of the line. One reason may have been that I was resisting this change from “big fish/small pond” to “small fish/big pond” and assuming, in my naivety, that if I stayed still then the whole world would stay still around me. Dumbass.

Another reason could have been Stephen. Allow me to explain.